House House, the small studio behind Untitled Goose Game, published an apology this week. The thing they apologised for was roughly ten lines of code.

I've been writing PHP for over 13 years, leading teams and shipping startups (some alive, most not). Reading this story, my first reaction was a nervous laugh. My second was "wait, what's our policy?" Both reactions deserve a closer look.

What actually happened

Here's the timeline, mostly from Inven Global's write-up and Ars Technica's piece:

  • Nov 9: 19 jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards put out a joint statement: they will not vote for any game that "has made use of generative AI in any capacity during its development."
  • One of the games in question turned out to be Big Walk, House House's co-op exploration game.
  • Nov 10: House House published an FAQ and an apology. According to the studio, late in development they hit a performance bug in Unity. Shadow calculations at sunrise and sunset grew out of control and halved the frame rate for about 20 seconds. They say Unity told them a proper fix wasn't possible in the current rendering pipeline.
  • So they described the problem to an LLM chatbot, took its suggestion and rewrote it by hand into about 10 lines, under 0.1% of the codebase. No AI was used for art, music, writing, narrative or voice.
  • They had disclosed this on their IGF submission, because the form asks about any AI use. Steam's rules didn't require it, so the store page says nothing. The studio also wrote: "Developing our game without an internal AI usage policy in place was a failure on our part" (VGC coverage).

As far as I can find, the IGF hasn't announced a decision on Big Walk's eligibility.

Why I don't buy "any capacity"

For non-developers, here's an analogy. A chef's oven keeps switching off mid-service. They ask someone why, get a hint, and fix the wiring themselves. Did that person cook the meal? I don't think so.

Debugging has always been a group sport. I've pasted error messages into search engines, read forum threads from 2011, and asked a colleague at 2am. Most of my best fixes started as someone else's idea that I bent to fit. If help like that counts, no software has ever been made by one person alone.

There's also a practical problem. Modern code editors autocomplete with AI by default. A rule of "any capacity" is one almost nobody can honestly follow. A rule nobody can follow doesn't produce clean games. It produces quiet developers. Notice who got punished here: the studio that disclosed it.

Why the jurors still have a point

I don't want to wave the other side away. Their main argument isn't really about these ten lines. These models were trained on huge amounts of work from people who never agreed to it, and many artists and writers are watching their income shrink because of it. From that seat, "only a little" is exactly how lines move. First it's a bug fix, then a texture, then a whole level.

Programming is also creative work. I've written code I was proud of in the way a musician is proud of a riff. So "it's just code" isn't a full answer either.

Where I land is a moderate spot. Using AI as a debugging assistant is a different category from using it to generate the creative output players actually experience. That's roughly how Valve's Steam disclosure rules seem to be drawn. Awards are free to set stricter rules. Those rules should still be ones people can follow, and they should be clear before submission, not after.

The practical lesson for any team

The most useful line in the whole story is House House's own: they had no internal AI policy. That's most teams I know, including some I've led.

If you run a team, even of three people, here's what I'd write down this week:

  1. Where AI is fine. For example: debugging help, explaining errors, writing tests, boilerplate.
  2. Where it's not. For example: final art, voice, copy that ships to customers, anything under a client contract that forbids it.
  3. How you track it. A simple note in the pull request or ticket is enough. Then you're never reconstructing history from memory when someone asks.
  4. Who you disclose to. Clients, platforms, awards, publishers. Check their forms before you need them.

It takes an hour. It's far cheaper than writing an apology FAQ.

So, where's your line?

I'm genuinely curious where other developers, artists and founders land on this. AI as a debugging helper is fine, AI nowhere near creative work, or anything goes as long as you disclose it? Which one, and why?